Privacy

A Lifebound book holds the things people write down once and never again — a pregnancy, a first year, a marriage, someone who died. This explains what we hold, who can see it, how long we keep it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

Who is responsible for it

Lifebound is run from the United Kingdom, and UK data protection law applies to everything below. The company details and our registration with the Information Commissioner’s Office will be published here before we take our first order.

Anything on this page, including any of the requests further down, goes to hello@lifebound.me, and a person reads it.

What we hold

Your account. Your email address, and your name if you give one. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your address, we record that the address we hold is a relay address rather than your own.

Your book. What kind of book it is — a pregnancy, a first year, a wedding, a year, a journey, a relationship, or something else — its title, who it is about and their first name if you give one, the date it is anchored to, when you started it, how often you asked to be reminded and at what time of day, the themes you chose, and the colour you chose for the cover.

What you write. The text of every entry, the day it belongs to, whether you marked it private, and when it was written and last changed.

Your photographs. The photographs you add, at the full resolution your phone holds them at, with the captions you write for them.

Your order. Your email, your name and delivery address, what you paid, in what currency and when, and our payment provider’s reference for it. If the book is a gift, the recipient’s name and email, your name and your message. We never see or hold your card number.

An email you leave us. If you ask to hear when we open somewhere we do not yet deliver, we hold that address and the month you told us your chapter starts, so that we can tell you.

Some of it is health information

If you choose a pregnancy book and give us a due date, we are holding a record that you are pregnant and roughly when the baby is due. Under UK data protection law that is health information, and it is treated more strictly than everything else: it needs your explicit permission, asked for on its own, and you can withdraw that permission at any time. Withdrawing it stops the prompts that depend on it. It does not touch a word you have written.

The app does not ask you for that permission yet. It will before the first book is ordered, and this section will change when it does. We would rather write that down than let you assume we had asked.

Writing about a bereavement is not health information in the same way — grief is not an illness — but it will often contain some, and we hold it to the same standard.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Your book, your writing, your photographs and your order are held to do the thing you asked us to do: make your book and post it to you. Health information is held on the explicit permission described above. Keeping accounts secure and stopping abuse rests on our legitimate interests. Tax and accounting records are a legal obligation. If we ever send you marketing email, that rests on your consent, asked for separately, and never bundled into checkout.

Who can see what you write

Your entries are private. We do not read them, we do not scan them, we do not analyse them, and we never use them to train anything.

Your book is laid out by software, not by hand. When you say it is finished, the print-ready file is made by a program running under your own sign-in, and the back office our support uses holds no read on entries at all — a person there can see that your book exists and how many pages it runs to, and nothing of what is in it. The database refuses to grant that permission, which is a deliberate choice rather than a habit.

The one place your writing goes is the printer. To make a book, the printer receives the finished print file and your delivery address. That is how a book gets made, and there is no version of this product where it does not happen.

If you would rather nobody saw a page, mark the entry private. Private entries never appear in the book and are never opened by anyone. They are still yours, so they are still in your export, marked as private.

The app can also turn what you say into text, and read a page you photographed and wrote by hand. Both are switched off. Nothing you say and no photograph of a page is sent to another company. If we ever turn them on, this page will say so, and name who receives what, before we do.

We do not read your entries to check on you

We do not monitor what you write, and we are not going to start. A journal about grief is supposed to contain the vocabulary of grief, and a product that watched for it would not be a private place to write. We are not a crisis service. There is a list of people who are very good at this in the app, always, on every book.

Where the law requires us to report something, we will. That is the only circumstance in which we would ever pass on anything you have written.

Who else handles your data

Four companies, and a printer we have not yet appointed.

• Supabase — our database, our sign-in, and the storage your photographs live in. Your writing and your photographs are held in London. Supabase also sends the email carrying your sign-in number.
• Vercel — hosts this website and runs the checkout pages. United States.
• Stripe — takes the payment. Your card details go to Stripe and never to us. United States.
• Expo — delivers updates to the app on your phone. United States.
• Apple — if you sign in with Apple, Apple tells us an email address for you. We tell Apple nothing about your book.
• The printer. We have not appointed one yet. Whoever it is will be named here, with the country your book would be printed in, before a single book is printed.

Several of those companies are based in the United States. The legal mechanism that covers each transfer is being confirmed, one by one, before we take our first order.

There is no analytics on this website or in the app — no tracking pixel, no advertising cookie, no third-party tag of any kind. Signing in with Apple sets one cookie that lasts ten minutes. The checkout page loads Stripe’s own payment form, which sets cookies of its own to detect fraud.

How long we keep it

Your writing and photographs — for as long as your account exists. Delete an entry and it sits somewhere you can reach it for 30 days before it is purged, so that losing a year of writing takes more than one wrong tap.

If you delete your account — your writing and photographs go. Copies survive in our backups for up to 35 days after that and then age out, and we do not restore deleted writing from a backup.

The print-ready file for your book — 90 days after your book is delivered, which covers the period in which we would reprint a faulty one.

The record of your order — your name, address, the amount and the date — six years, because tax law requires it. Support email — three years.

An email you left to hear when we open somewhere — for as long as you want to hear from us, and three years after that as the record that you asked.

Taking your writing with you

You can export everything you have written and every photograph you have added, at full resolution, at any time, for free. There is no condition on it of any kind. Whether you have bought a book or not, whether your order is live, refunded, cancelled or finished, whether your book is paused or closed — the export works. It is the one thing nothing in this product is ever allowed to stand in front of.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from inside the app. It removes your sign-in, your books, your entries and your photographs.

What stays is the transaction: if you have ordered a book, the record of that order is kept for six years, because we are required to keep them. So your writing goes and the receipt does not — we would rather say that here than have you hear from us about VAT a year after you thought everything was gone.

If a book of yours is already at the printer or in the post, we will not delete the account underneath it, because that would leave you having paid for a book that can no longer be made. We will tell you which order it is, finish it, and then delete.

A printed book can’t be unprinted

Once it has been made and posted, it belongs to the person who ordered it, and we have no way to get it back. We can erase everything we hold, and we will. We cannot reach an object that is on somebody’s shelf, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If someone has written about you

A book is one person writing, and they will have written about other people — a partner, a parent, a friend, and very often a child. A first-year book is largely about a baby who cannot agree to any of it, and who will one day be an adult with the same rights as anybody else.

We hold that writing but we did not get it from you, and for an infant there is no way for us to come and tell you, which is why this section is here in public instead. If you believe someone has written about you in a Lifebound book, or you are the parent of a child who has been written about, write to us and we will tell you what we hold and act on a request to erase it, on exactly the same terms as we would for the person who wrote it. The printed book is the exception described above.

Children

Lifebound is for adults. You need to be 18 to have an account. Children appear in these books as the subject, never as the writer.

What you can ask us to do

You can ask for a copy of everything we hold about you, and you do not need to ask — the export above does it, immediately and for free. You can ask us to correct something that is wrong. You can ask us to erase what we hold, and delete your account yourself from inside the app. You can ask us to stop doing something, or to restrict it while a question is settled. You can withdraw a permission you gave, at any time, and it must be as easy to withdraw as it was to give.

If you think we have handled your data badly, tell us and we will fix it. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, at ico.org.uk, and you do not have to talk to us first.

Changes

If this notice changes we will say what changed and when, rather than replacing it quietly. If the change means something new leaves our own servers, we will say so before it does.

This notice describes what the product actually does today. A solicitor and a data-protection adviser are reviewing it before we take our first order, and some of what is described above — the health-information permission, the printer, our company registration — is named here as outstanding rather than settled. Anything unclear in the meantime goes to a real person: hello@lifebound.me.